For many of us on the Riviera and in Liguria, the northwest part of Italy, Clarence Bicknell is worshipped as a marvel.

His website calls him The Victorian Polymath and describes his huge output of extraordinary botanical drawings (many with Victorian humour and whimsy to say nothing of the arts and crafts elements), rock engraving copies, pressed flowers, sketchbooks, and paintings. The Museo Bicknell in Bordighera, which he built in 1888, is a hidden gem evocative of a bygone era but in so many ways relevant today. Do check the opening times on its website and pay it a visit; you will come away with that exhilarating feeling of having discovered a secret.

Clarence Bicknell at his Casa Fontanalba, 1916

The Casa Fontanalba which he built in 1906 at Casterino 1,550 metres up in the Alps, is a living museum of arts-and-crafts-style frescoes of plants and Esperanto sayings, regrettably not open to the public.

Since 1988 when I first took a family trip up to Tende, Casterino and the Vallée des Merveilles in the Mercantour mountains behind Nice, I have accepted willingly the mantle of Clarence’s prime promotion agent. My uncle Peter bequeathed to me the family’s collection of some of his precious vellum-bound illustrated albums and a mass of sketch-book and files, those that did not end up in the University of Genoa, at the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge or in the Museo Bicknell. When I retired from full-time work in 2013, I and some other Clarence faithfuls created the Clarence Bicknell Association and the website with the purpose of spreading his reputation to Britain, America and the rest of the world.

Clarence is not well known outside the Riviera; he lived in Bordighera and didn’t attach importance to the Royal societies and the burgeoning scientific salons of London. His works have always remained in private hands, owners who have not wanted to relinquish them, so very rarely have his works come up at auction. This makes it all the more exciting to follow his footsteps round the Riviera and hinterland… to discover him for yourself.

Clarence’s website has published close to 200 research papers on his works, his network of like-minded botanists and on a wide range of subjects from hymns in Esperanto, to the British royal families in Liguria and the gardening experts working for Thomas Hanbury in his renowned gardens tumbling into the sea on the French Italian border. The publication of the names of the people in his visitors’ book is on the Internet and so from time to time a researcher into one of Clarence’s network of scientists finds out about the link and is able to find out more from us and contribute further to the mine of knowledge.

A design by Clarence Bicknell in the Fitzwilliam Museum

Aquilegia Atrata by Clarence Bicknell

It is with a sense of joy that I return in late April from a week’s visit to Clarence’s homeland. I gave talks in Genoa, in Bordighera (one to an English speaking audience and one to Italians) and in Nice. The enthusiasm of those that did not know about him, or only vaguely, is boundless. The desire both to know more and to contribute from those who do know about Clarence is both heart-warming and academically productive. At the Friends of the Riviera get-together, Giuliano Gaia, who had purchased six of Bicknell’s prints of the arts-and-crafts framed watercolours of Alpine flowers (one of the prints, an Aquilegia, above), regaled the group with such enthusiasm that my job – a talk about Clarence’s art – was made particularly easy. Thank you. A day later in Nice, in the library underneath the English church, a small number of people packed the space out, many of the audience there keen to see more of Clarence’s Alpine flower watercolours. Jean-Félix Gandioli came and contributed; he is writer, teacher, professor of ecological botany, Attaché Scientifique at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Nice and promoter with me a few years ago of an exhibition there of Les Botanistes au Sommet in which Clarence was featured as one of the six botanists who went up into the high mountains of the southern Alps at the turn of the century.

The Museo Bicknell in Bordighera

The highlight of my little trip was certainly the conference organised by Dssa. Daniela Gandolfi, director of the International Institute of Ligurian Studies, the owner of the Museo Bicknell in Bordighera; a big crowd this time, no chairs remaining. I was able to introduce the background to Clarence‘s extraordinary Casa Fontanalba Visitors’ Book; anybody who visited his mountain house between 1906 and his death in 1918 signed the book, so it is a who’s-who of archaeologists, botanists, mineralogists, Esperantists and other scientists. It is also a miraculous display of Clarence’s large-scale watercolours of alpine flowers in arts-and-crafts ornamented borders. Then two other speakers filled in the gaps.

Claudio Littardi, a botanist also with the IISL, went into the detail of Clarence’s watercolours, the twelve species that went on sale at the museum on the day. Claudio showed how Bicknell in each case paid attention to the aspects of the plant and flower which defined its species; behind the charm and colour of the petals, leaves, stems and arts and crafts borders lies disciplined knowledge of the Linnaean classification system which defines Genus and species; immensely decorative but at the same time academically correct.

Photo courtesy Marcus Bicknell

Maria Pia Luly Jones, a noted botanical watercolourist who lived for a long time in Bordighera and is passionate about Clarence, demonstrated some of the techniques that Clarence must have used when painting; how to draw straight lines with a brush, how to make the stroke from the bottom to the top to get even paint thickness, how to use a fine brush of only four hairs for the finest of detail and how to mix yellow. At moments when Maria Pia evoked in a voice which faltered for a second, Clarence was there with us in the room and a hundred fascinated faces. Others felt it too. Tim Leach, Tende resident and video blogger wrote to me the same day “what an interesting and enjoyable event it was. It made me smile to imagine what Clarence might have thought, if he could have seen his great-grand-nephew and so many other people sitting in his museum in the year 2025, all coming together to celebrate his work! What a legacy!”

The little conference was the opportunity to announce that 12 of Clarence’s wild flower images from the Casa Fontanalba Visitors’ Book went on sale in the Museo Bicknell the same day. Yes they were flying off the shelves afterwards. You can look at them and have them sent worldwide. Put them up in your home. Enjoy. Remember the modest talents of figures from our past.

Many aspects of our culture, from hobbies to music, ancient history to great rock bands, are not just enjoyable for each of us but fundamentally important. In working on Clarence’s patrimoine, I feel certain that there is long-term value to the human race in protecting and promoting our cultural heritage, both the bricks-and-mortar of our historic sites and artistic creations but also our intangible cultural heritage, the memories we can’t touch but which we treasure so much.

Valerie Lester‘s 2018 biography of Clarence Bicknell is called MARVELS; everything he touched was a marvel. Every time a new group of people acclaim his talents – or even just one person – I get the buzz of a job well done.

Buy books and prints on the website

All images courtesy Marcus Bicknell and Museo Bicknell